From
Hebrews 11:1-31
H,
I do understand your point
about the state of heart that is faith, the not giving up to despair and the
crucial act of looking up. I guess we can add to that the now famous “works” of
faith. The things that faith leads you to do and, more importantly, the kind of
person it makes you.
It has been really drawn
through the ground and into the murky swamps of human agenda, but it is a beautiful
thing when a heart responds to faith and the body and mind follow. It is not to
be dismissed. So often the fear of doing something wrong cripples any attempt
at doing it right. And we know that fear is not a part of love, the greatest of
all, so it cannot be in our acts of faith. We cannot be afraid of error to the
point of inertia. We have to allow ourselves to be compelled into these great
works that we are always being told lie within us.
There are a number of
problems with following through on this. On the top of the shelf is the human
need for control and clarity. We have a God-complex that envisions knowing the
end from the beginning in every situation and since we are not omniscient, this
will not happen on this side of the story. So, we get frustrated and muck things
up and then just make things up to call faith.
The other problem, which I should
have brought up first, is the act itself. From our spiritual ancestors we see
that the acts of faith were all done in response to God. They did not go
looking for acts to do. They were called and appointed and anointed and all
that metamorphosis took place before they got on their mostly un-merry road to do
great deeds. The thing is in the listening, knowing and being led by the omniscient
one, not pretending to be that one. There are voices always heard and things
always done in the “name of God”, that have nothing to do with the character of
love. We are human and we can always make a mistake about what God wants or
where He wants us to go and we can always misinterpret scripture. What we can
rarely get wrong is what ties all His truth together: the Character of love as
revealed in Christ. Against such love there is no law. We cannot be wrong if we
attempt to love in the conscious grace of receiving His love and transmitting
it to others. This is all the “great works” we are all called to do.
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